


my name is my own (unless it’s on loan)

by GrapieBee



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Character Study, Female Crowley (Good Omens), Female Presenting Crowley, Gen, I die like the French fried bitch I am, M/M, Mentions of hell, Mentions of the Crucifixtion, No Beta, She/Her Pronouns Used For Crowley, ish, mentions of Yeshua, mentions of physical abuse, mentions of prostitution as a occupation, will add tags as need be
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-07-10 15:22:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19907908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrapieBee/pseuds/GrapieBee
Summary: The question has always been simply complex; what is in a name?[Or the five times Crowley’s name changed and the one time Aziraphale’s did too.]





	1. Gifts

**Author's Note:**

> First time writing in an extremely long while and first time writing for this fandom. Hopefully you will all enjoy!

Names, as it turns out, are odd things when you get right down to it.

They are, usually, the first gift ever given to a person. A gift that can have an awful lot of weight in shaping how people feel about each other, but a gift nonetheless.

Crawly had, like many things, taken the task into his own hands.*

(*Once he had hands and, you know, wasn’t quite so stuck slithering about and all that)

He doesn’t often think back to the day he Fell, but when he does, there is often a small sense of pride mixed in with all the other...less than pleasant sensations of pulling yourself from a boiling pool of sulfur.

The pride had nothing to do with where he was; Hell itself was pain incarnate and so new to creation at the time that every inch of it was like touching a live wire to ruined skin. The pride came from when he decided to name himself. True, he had been half delirious with agony and gripped with the cold terror that this might be his new eternity, but the name Crawly had felt right in that moment. 

It felt like a name of Dirt and Grime; like it belonged to the pests and vermin that could so easily disappear from searching eyes if need be. It was the sort of name that always invoked an image; whether that image was good or bad, he had yet to decide.

Or at least, Crawly thought to himself, the name didn’t hurt to think about.

His divine name, now just a blinding mess of light in his memories whenever he tried to drag the syllables out of his throat, did not belong to him anymore. 

Names, as far as he had known, were supposed to be gifts. 

A gift was supposed to be something given freely, a signature of not expecting something in return.

For a gift to be taken back when you did something that made the giver unhappy...well, Crawly had to wonder if he wasn’t better without his divine name anyways.

It was just as he was getting used to the name, the way it felt on his tongue and sounded in his ears, that he found himself being told to ‘head upstairs and make some trouble’.

So, leaving behind the pain of his Fall and the cold and empty ache in his chest where a beloved name had once lived, Crawly slithered into the Garden of Eden.


	2. Crowley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crawly becomes Crowley.

A great many things had happened since Crawly had decided on his name.

To start, **_rain_** had become a Thing.

So too had **_death_** and **_murder_** and **_grief_** , but you had to take the bad with the good and all that.

And, at present, he was tempting the Son of God with visions of all the wonders of the world. Or, at the very least, he had very well tried to.

“No thank you, I’m quite fine with what I have here. Please leave me be, Satan.” Yeshua said, through cracked lips and sand dry tongue, as his eyes closed once more. He’d been so weak when Crawly had found him sprawled out at the top of a mountain that the poor bastard had mistaken him for The Great Adversary himself. 

Yeshua was likely dying, as any human was bound to do after being slowly deprived of food and drink for forty days and nights in a _blessed desert_! Crawly dropped the temptation that colored the mountain sky with images he didn’t understand[*] as his features naturally pulled into something akin to relief.

[*Buildings as tall as he could fly, covered in _something_ thin and translucent that readily reflected the sunlight back at him; masses of unfathomably huge wealth, resources to spread the good word and help the needy hundreds of times over; a dark room filled with people laughing at the moving pictures in a small box- so many things that did not yet have meaning to the world at large were somehow supposed to tempt the Son of God. No wonder the poor man seemed content with dying instead.]

“Right. Ok. Did my demonic duty and all that. Gave it the old college try.” He said to no one as he remained kneeled beside the young man. 

He didn’t yet know what colleges were or what they _would_ be, but the saying rolled off his tongue like it was the easiest thing in the world and he so did love it when words did that. 

What he left unsaid was _‘I should do my civic duty and make sure this idiot doesn’t die under Aziraphale’s watch.’_

While it would be years before he so much as had the courage to even _think_ about broaching the topic of what would eventually become The Arrangement with the angel, Crawly knew the importance of sowing seeds when no one is looking.

He pressed his fingers into the meat of his temples and imagined with such intensity that everything in the vicinity (Save for him and the half-dead man) was at a complete standstill, that It Just Was. Being, apparently, the only demon with any sort of imagination had its fringe benefits, at times.

Crawly gave a snap of the fingers and her corporation shifted around her; not by much, just an adjustment to the placement of what little fat her corporation held on to, a lengthening of the hair and clothes, and not much else. 

She knew humans, especially hunger induced delirious ones, had about as much object permanence as their infant young. The slight change to her physique would, hopefully, confuse Yeshua to no end. It was a hope Crawly was counting on. She knew this little divine bastard would be blubbering to his merry band of men the moment he stepped foot back into civilization. 

She really, _really_ did not need him to make any connection between the demon that had tempted him and the woman shaped thing who was about to help him.

There was a black headcover waiting for Crawly’s hands when she placed them in her lap because she _expected_ it to be there. She draped and tucked it around her head in a poor approximation of what she had seen the local women wear, a frown tugging at her lips as she did so. Humans made this look so much easier. Really though, _someone_ had to give her credit, she was at least trying to blend in.

“Alright then, enough of this nonsense, up you get.” She said, her tone leaving no room for argument. 

She all but manhandled Yeshua into an upright position and, with only a _little_ bit of demonic help, hauled him like a sack of grain over her shoulder, stood, and began to walk.

“Who-“

“Oh do shut it and try not to die while I get you somewhere safe.” She barked, concentration set solely on her already normally imperfect balance. No use picking the poor kid up if she was just going to go dropping him immediately.

Somewhere safe ended up being a cave. 

Crawly expected it to have a passable bed of straw, the chill of deep places to keep it comfortable during the day, and the dry warmth of a hearth to keep it comfortable at night, so it did. She settled the young man into the straw, plenty of food and drink laid within hand’s reach of the human with another snap of the fingers. 

Crawly knew without seeing it that Yeshua had watched these things come into existence of their own accord. Unlike his fellow human brethren, however, it did not seem to frighten him. He blinked and looked to her after a moment, eyes bright and curious, despite his exhaustion. 

”Wha- where did you-“ 

She doesn’t even let him finish his attempt at a thought before she’s gone, another flick of the wrist, a snap, and the desert was as it had always been. The only things changed being where Yeshua lay, a cup of water that never emptied, and a meal that would only vanish when the young man was strong enough to make it home to his earthly mother safely.

Crawly would spend days after this act of kind- no, nope, no way, she wasn’t even going to think about the ‘K’ word. 

Either way, regardless of what she did or _did not_ call what she did for Yeshua, Crawly found herself agonizing over what she would tell her superiors when they found out what sha had done; especially when they found out she had failed in her temptations of him anyways. Because of course they would find out. They always did. 

She tried to convince herself, down to her very core, that what she had done was for the greater good of Hell; what was the point of the Son of God walking the Earth if she only got to try her hand at tempting him just the once, she reasoned.

So, lines practiced and reasoning sound, she waited for the other shoe to drop.

When the first day passed without so much as a beat of demonic energy other than her own in the area, she kept herself alert.

When it had been a week, she was mostly confused.

When it had been a month, she finally breathed a sigh of relief. 

However impossible it seemed, perhaps she actually _had_ gotten away with something...not kind and certainly never Good. Less Bad. 

She had gotten away with doing something Less Bad.

Poetry, that.

It’s well into the first week of a new month when she decided that, perhaps, it would be safe to shift back into her preferred form and metaphorically slink off to a new city. Laying low in “dens for fleshy-bits”, as one specifically endearing angel had called them so many years ago, really was only easy if you were inclined to blend in with the work done there. For her, that meant taking over as the Keeper of the establishment.

Crawly, despite her demonic nature, found the sort of company the women were expected to keep in these places still to be rather appalling. The sorts of men that frequented whorehouses were hardly ever the gentle kind. 

Often, particularly for the truly dark hearted ones, it was often less about the acts they paid the women to do and more about the _fear_ they could cultivate from them. On the unfortunately common occasion that one of the girls came back to her with a bruise forming around the apple of a cheek or lip split and bloodied, Crawly made sure to see the customer out the door herself. 

Where they would often find themselves compelled to empty their pockets of all valuables by the time they reached the front threshold. They would never, ever come back and, often, were never seen in the city again. She was in the process of dealing with one such visitor when Yeshua finally caught up with her. 

Crawly was so focused on imprinting all the Hellish Fury she could muster onto the back of a particularly nasty customer’s head, that she never heard the young man approach to begin with.

The old, sour grape of a man would be their last for the night; unlike the other keepers of such establishments, Crawly made sure her girls had a few hours in their night to themselves. Instead of closing shop as the sun rose, it was usually just after the moon was half way through the sky. Plenty of personal time.

If ever questioned for such graciousness, she would attribute it to being simple math:

She knew happy girls meant happy customers, happy customers meant more money. 

The older ladies would be finished making dinner here soon, not that Crawly ever partook. The wine, yes. The food, no. It always smelled good, whatever it was they made. 

In just a bit, everyone would be gathered and happily talking together, like a little patchwork quilt of a family against the backdrop of a harsh life. 

They would be able to rest for a bit as the sun crept across the sky, then night would come and it would be back to wor-

“It _is_ you!” The genuinely pleased tone of the voice should have immediately tipped her off. No way it could have belonged to a customer.

Crawly’s head all but snapped around to face Yeshua, the yellow of her eyes bleeding into the whites, just a bit. She _really_ did not like surprises.

A month of rest and food had done him good, by the look of it. His eyes were still just as bright as they had been when she last saw them; now though, they were no longer sunken into the face of someone half dead from hunger. This suited him, actually looking alive, she found herself thinking.

Yeshua smiled as he drew near and, oh for Sa-, for Someone’s sake, he had his arms flung open as if he meant to embrace her! Like some old friend. Can’t have that happen.

“My Sister, hello again!” He exclaimed, face filled with a beaming smile, only to have a small, pale hand roughly slap against his mouth.

“Ssssshut up.” Crawly hissed at him, her free hand pulling the headcover tighter around her copper ringlets, her grip pulling the fabric so it shadowed her eyes _just_ enough that their color and pupil shape were difficult to discern.

He still tried to hold her gaze, even as he lowered his arms and waited for her to move, her palm still firmly pressed to his face.

“Look, I don’t know who you think you are, but you don’t just- you don’t just _go around_ trying to hug people. Not here. You’ll get yourself robbed doing that. Or, I don’t know, stabbed or something equally **_stupid_ ** .” She emphasised the last word by abruptly removing her hand from his mouth, her tone making it clear that she was not _nearly_ as happy to see him as he was her.

“I apologize if I’ve done something to offend. I merely wanted to t-”

“Better not thank me.” She interrupted him as she folded her arms in front of her in a faux casualness.

A demon could get in a lot of trouble for being thanked by the wrong human. Not that Yeshua knew that she was a demon, to start. 

“But-”

“Nope.”

“Please-”

“Nu-Uh.”

“If I could just-“ 

“Zip it.”

Crawly watched as confusion passed through Yeshua’s eyes, soft hazel things with speckles of gold and orange woven in them, his mouth forming a thin line across his face.

“Alright. I simply won’t thank anyone _present,_ than. I’ll instead thank a kind stranger from the desert, if that would make you feel better, Sister.”

She couldn’t help the thrum of relief that washed over her at his words. Maybe that’s what humans felt when they asked for and received forgiveness. Maybe she was just full of hot air.

“But, if I _could_ bother you for it, I need a place to stay the night.”

“And?” she said simply, her tone more neutral than earlier.

“As I’m sure you know, the city is full of travelers tonight and, unfortunately, so are all the rooms at the Inns. I’d gladly pay double, so long as I’m not asked to sleep in a manger.” 

Crawly couldn’t help the genuine huff of laughter that bubbled from her chest at his request. The Son of God asking a demon for a room to rest in at a brothel. The deep irony was not lost on her in the slightest, nor was the manger comment.

“Look, you can pay double if you want, especially if the city is as full as you say. But we don’t rent out our rooms overnight, it’s only by the hour.”

She watched his shoulders sank slightly as she spoke, her clever mind quickly jumping through every loophole she could, trying to see how this could be turned in her favor. If need be, she could claim that the opportunity for a temptation arose naturally, should cover be needed. 

Yeah...that would do.

“Tell you what,” she started again, cocking a hip to the side as she crossed her arms, “we’re about to have our supper for the evening. You come join us, have a bit of wine, see where the night takes you.”

“That’s very kind of you, but I’m really not that hungr-” It was at that moment that his stomach decided to give a decidedly loud rumble.

Crawly gave a single bark of laughter, the ridiculous timing of the whole thing surprising her.

“You were saying?”

“Alright, so maybe some food would be nice.” 

It was hours later that he food stores found itself several jugs of wine lighter, the Son of God and a servant of Satan found themselves the only two still awake, talking animatedly. The wine had helped coax words forward and, soon enough, their conversation grew natural traction in the shared interest of the treatment of the weak and sick in modern cities. That was a conversation held with the table, as Yeshua insisted on hearing the ladies’ opinions on the matter themselves.

Yeshua had eaten his fill hours ago and had become progressively more relaxed by the time he asked his first question of the night, everyone else long asleep. 

“What’s your name, by the way?”

“Crawly.” She said easily, the name well practiced on her tongue, even when the slightest bit tipsy.

“Really? Not Lillith? Mastema? I would have thought every demon had some sort of, I don’t know, ornate name. You got to choose your new name after you fell, right?”

The meaning of his words weren’t lost to her for a moment and, wine added through her brain was, the hairs on the nape of her neck still reflexively stood on end.

Crawly stared into Yeshua’s face, allowing the human to fully see her own eyes for what they were in the low firelight of the room. 

Oddly bright. Unnerving. Evil. 

But he did not look away, did not so much as even tense.

“So, wha- what, you just knew what I was this entire time? And you still sought out my company?” She paused for a moment, tilting her head just slightly as she gave him a confused look, not sure if her intrigue outweighed her genuine annoyance with his feigned ignorance. “Are you stupid or something?”

She watched as his earnest and open expression broke into that of a smile. Then a chuckle. Then an all out laugh. 

Crawly had half a mind to leave him sitting there to laugh all by himself. A moment later he held his hand up in front of him, giving her a silent apology as he allowed his laughter to peeter out. 

“I meant no insult, laughing like that.” Is what Yeshua eventually managed.

“Could’ve fooled me.” 

His laughter had fully died by the time he spoke again.

“Your name though...you don't **actually** think it suits you, do you? You just don’t look much like a ‘Crawly’ to me.”

She took a deep drink from her glass, pretending to think deeply about the question. Introspection was plenty fun, so long as _she_ wasn’t the topic of conversation.

“I mean, snake of Eden, original temptor, temptress, whatever, and all that.” She said, “No better name for me than something that makes you think of the squirming-at-your-feet sort of animals.”

“No, I suppose you’re right, in your own way. You’ve got wings though, don’t you? Those are still there. Like a crow’s, if my eyes are making out the color right. Wouldn’t it have been nicer to name yourself after something that can fly away? Something that can be free?”

Crawly had never before flung herself so quickly from her human form before; the conversation had taken a turn so quickly into painful territory that the shift had been more of a recoil than a conscious choice.

She crumpled to the ground and into the long, strong muscles of a reptile, before she slithered away as fast as she could. She would never speak of this and, she hoped that the stupid, **_bright_ ** young man she had spent hours talking to knew what was at stake should he mention her in any positive sort of light.

She pretended to not hear him yell out for her to return. 

Pretended that the eventual written inaccuracies of _Satan_ tempting Yeshua in the desert don’t annoy her. 

Pretended that it didn’t make her feel bitter in a self-loathing sort of way when scripture talked of how _angels_ tended to Yeshua as he was dying in the sands of the wilderness. 

As she watched the crucifixion, with Aziraphale at her side, she pretended to fully listen to him, her eyes still entirely glued to the scene in front of her. When Yeshua was hoisted high above those who loved and hated him on little more than a plank of wood like a lamb on a spit, Crawly pretended his anguished cries don’t hurt some old, broken part of her.

Their conversation flowed easily, even when acidic bitterness coated her words as she spoke.

“You know I’m not consulted on policy decisions, Crawly.”

“Oh, I’ve changed it.” The decision came to her right then and there, rash and terribly sudden. 

“Changed what?”

“My name. Crawly wasn’t really doing it for me,” she continued, “It’s a bit too...squirming-at-your-feet-ish.”

“Well, you _were_ a snake. So, what is it now? Mephistopheles? Asmodeus?”

 _Your name...you don't_ **_actually_ ** _think it suits you, do you?_

_You’ve got wings though, don’t you?_

_Like a crow’s, if my eyes are making out the color right._

_Wouldn’t it have been nicer to name yourself after something that can fly away?_

_Something that can be free?_

  
“Crowley.”


End file.
